Reagan Bush Drug Legacy in Centam Robert Parry 2007

Reagan-Bush Drug Legacy in CentAm By Robert Parry March 6, 2007 That ugly reality broke into the headlines on Feb. 19 when three Salvadoran congressmen were waylaid while driving along a road in Guatemala. The politicians included Eduardo Jose D’Aubuisson, the son of the late Roberto D’Aubuisson, who led El Salvador’s feared “death squads” in the 1980s and established the powerful right-wing Arena Party. Guatemalan prosecutors said one of the abductors was Luis Arturo Herrera, who was head of the Guatemalan National Police’s organized crime unit. Herrera and three other policemen took the captives to a remote area, searched their vehicle, beat the victims and later executed them, the prosecutors said. The four policemen were quickly identified because their unmarked police car had a tracking beacon that placed them at the scene. The officers confessed, claiming they believed that the three Salvadorans were drug dealers, a suspicion shared by many Central American journalists and other experts. The policemen were confined at a Guatemalan maximum security prison, but on Feb. 25, a group of masked gunmen in military clothing entered the prison, passed through seven locked doors and executed the four policemen, according to inmates and prison visitors. The slayings had the look of one drug-connected group eliminating another and then a third band of killers silencing the detained policemen for fear they might finger higher-ups in a cocaine-and-corruption scandal. For their part, Guatemalan authorities claimed the four policemen died in a prison riot.